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When it comes to control panels and user interfaces, both AMD and Nvidia have taken an incremental approach to adding features or changing the basic UI. Today, Team Red is shaking that trend up, with a brand-new driver stack that offers an entirely different UI — and a host of other improvements as well. It’s a huge jump forward on multiple fronts for AMD and an encouraging sign to see the company taking multiple aspects of support more seriously. The images below can be clicked for enlarged versions.

Evolution of Catalyst

Here’s the evolution of AMD’s UI from 2002 to the present day. The original Catalyst Control Center debuted in 2002 and the major themes were established by 2006. The 2015 UI is a clear evolution of the 2006 design rather than a wholesale revamp. Today’s Radeon Crimson Software Edition (Crimson for short) breaks with this trend in favor of a Metro-like interface — but we actually mean that in a good way.

Here’s an example of the old layout, which required some scaling or resizing to make elements fit, as compared to the new global profile page:

I’m not normally someone who likes change, but I like the new design. Click on each option, and you’re presented with drop-down dialog boxes to change settings. The UI is designed for widescreen 16:9 monitors, which offer more horizontal space but less vertical. The color scheme is opposite from AMD’s traditional, but it works for me (personal opinions may vary, of course).

Much like Windows 10 itself, elements of the “traditional” Catalyst UI are still buried in the system. AMD hasn’t clarified when it’ll be excising these, but hopefully the company will transition entirely over to one standard at some point in 2016.

The Improvements

The new UI is interesting, but it’s scarcely the only goodie packed into this software. AMD claims to have fixed a number of bugs, as shown below:

Other significant features include much faster start-up times (verified — Radeon Crimson is lighting-fast to open compared to the older Catalyst Control Center), a new clean uninstall utility that should obviate the need for products like DisplayDriverUninstaller when swapping video cards, a new LiquidVR driver, FreeSync support in DirectX 9, a new low frame rate compensation method, frame pacing support for multi-GPU configurations in DirectX 9, and a new shader cache to improve game performance and load times, up to 20% improved performance in certain title (Fable Legends is called out here), and substantially better power consumption when watching video.

That’s quite a bit, so let’s unpack some of it. The improvements to FreeSync are a major issue, since they’re intended to address one of the areas where AMD was perceived as lagging Nvidia. Last year, PC Perspective ran a story on the difference between G-Sync and FreeSync, as shown below:

Originally, G-Sync ran at much lower frame rates than FreeSync by artificially doubling up frames to keep the effective refresh rate higher. Our own testing on mobile hardware showed that there was an effective limit to this capability (skipping became visible around the 25 FPS mark, even with doubled frames), but it allowed G-Sync to work at much lower frame rate targets. FreeSync, in contrast, switched off at or below 40 FPS.

FreeSync’s new behavior at lower frame rates

Now, AMD has made a number of software changes that should improve FreeSync perfomance in scenarios where the frame rate drops below the refresh rate. This should close the gap with Nvidia’s G-Sync, though we’ll need to test to find out if the difference has been eliminated.

I uninstall from the Windows control panel first. Then, before rebooting, run DDU. DDU will ask to reboot in safe mode, say yes.

Once rebooted into safe mode, run DDU. Then reboot again, install your driver suite for whatever manufacturer you use.

close

No, as I said I just tried the upgrade and from a beta version even. Still, I’ve never had any problems upgrading Intel and Nvidia drivers (which may not fit the general trend). Actually the only time I needed to do an uninstall (except switching vendors on a machine) was when an older version of the Catalyst was not upgrading without errors.

After several tries the driver actually got installed but still with the old Control Center.

And there I was, really happy that AMD paid plenty of attention to that driver for the first time in so many years.

Faibless

it took over a year for nvidia to fix a bluescreen crash caused by their Geforce experience bullshit. i tried everything. some are still reporting it. there’s always problems with tech, just be happy when it isnt you and don’t be the stupid fanboy

close

@Faibless, fanboy of what? Don’t you kids have any other script to follow these days that doesn’t throw around the word “fanboy” whenever someone raises an issue? I’m a fan of whatever does the job better for the least money. I can’t make it simpler than this for you.

But I admit, I just love the software support Intel is providing for their iGPUs. Truth be told those little bastards never failed when updating the drivers.

I’ll say it again, I understand it may be “a good idea” to uninstall the driver but then again I’m not seeing any of the big three removing the upgrade option from their installers. It even looks like they favor the “Express” installation method and recommend a clean install only to “fix issues”, not as normal practice.

I would say that everybody expects it to work and when it doesn’t it should be fixed. As simple as that. I won’t throw my card away, I won’t “never ever ever buy crappy AMD cards again”, I’ll just wait for the next release or the next time I reinstall Windows (in 2-3 years…).

@( ͡ ° Chris ͜ʖ mas ͡° ) – Half of the time the checkmark is actually yellow. Checking the log it’s usually minor MSI errors that wouldn’t actually break the installation. Once it was a driver update failure and I had to do a clean install (but this was several years back). But this time it’s just hanging and I’d rather not spend time troubleshooting an issue that might be just teething problems for a new generation of drivers.

Faibless

didnt mean you were the fanboy. i meant in generalities, like you said. Dont be a fanboy, just buy whats the best for you at the moment you buy.

Joel Hruska

I never upgrade any GPU driver installation in place and don’t recommend that others do so, either. Which company better supports the process, I can’t say.

Lipsoka

I always uninstalled first, as you said! Close, you should do it! I didn’t ever used a third party, i just uninstall from Control Panel, click on Express Uninstall – All AMD software, all of it. The install the new one and you’re good to go. There’s also a check mark when you finished uninstalling telling you everything is ok or not :P

Orumus

Just an FYI , I always completely uninstall previous drivers/packages before installing new ones but this time I wanted to see how this new package behaved and it completely wiped all the old data. I was impressed.

Mike kizaberg

oh is it, then amd should sort this out to be fair

surfshop

Its rubbish

hellowalkman

no it works on my 6670

Phobos

but it doesn’t get any improvements, does it?

Joel Hruska

You should get shader caching, all the improvements baked into this driver release, and possibly some power consumption improvements. Plus the ability to set game profiles and custom overclock settings.

As far as the new software is concerned it’ll work. However if you’re expecting all the features that have been added for GCN only, no go. Would recommend you upgrade your drivers anyway just for the sake of Radeon Software. Most of the general benchies were showing 1-3 FPS improvements anyhow so with a GFX card so old don’t expect much.

FYI I’m an HD 5850 user. Arctic island is ~9-11 months away

Phobos

I don’t know if I should upgrade or wait for Arctic Island, yeah it almost a year but time travels so fast.

Daniel Anderson

Yeah I feel you on that. I was going to wait it out. However from how I see it. My current mobo only has PCIE 2.0 and I’m going to upgrade to an R9 390 (or maybe R9 380x even though 390 appears to have ~70% improved performance). Furthermore PCIE 3.0 cards can be used in PCIE4.0 slots (~2017) however PCIE 4.0 cards cannot be used in PCIE 3.0 slots.

Why this matters? It will be a decent backup GPU just in case of failures next year or the following few that I can at least still game on to hold me over for a replacement. I’m also very excited for DX12 titles with Async compatibility.

Just think to yourself how many games you play, or that are coming out, that are actually demanding more than your card can handle. Bonus time just came in for me so I feel like treating myself >=D. At least thats the excuse I’m using. Gawd that 100 watt increase though.

Phobos

If PCIE 4.0 video cards are not going to be compatible with PCIE 2.0 I’m screw, yeah I guess I will have to upgrade very soon then. They might arrive by the time zen gets here, hopefully I will have enough $$ to build a new system.

Joel Hruska

PCIe 3.0 cards should work in PCIe 4.0 slots. PCIe 4.0 cards will not work in PCIe 3.0 slots or earlier (at least that’s my current understanding).

The problem is the signal timing and associated factors that go with it.

PCIe was clocked at 2.5GT/s (gigatransfers per second). PCIe 2.0 doubled that to 5GT/s. PCIe 3.0 increased its data rate to 8GT/s, but it accomplished this in part by using a much more efficient encoding algorithm. PCIe 1.0 and 2.0 had an 8bit/10bit algorithm, which meant you paid 20% of your bits in overhead signaling. PCIe 3.0 uses a 128bit/130-bit system, which allowed for much more efficient encoding.

PCIe 4.0 *is* stepping up to double transfer rates again, at 8GT/s of unidirectional bandwidth (all of these measurements are given per lane, with 16 lanes per typical implementation). In theory, PCIe 4.0 has about 31GB/s of bandwidth (16GB in one direction), which puts it on par with a modest DDR3 memory interface, although at much higher latency.

But running that kind of transfer rate across a *bus* that’s up to several inches from the CPU is much harder than running dedicated traces to memory banks that sit millimeters away. That’s why PCIe 4.0 has taken so much longer to put together than previous versions (it’s not expected in shipping hardware until 2019).

Neoprimal

I only really play WoW and messed with Tera. I do have Skyrim and some other games. Every year for the last 3 years I’ve said, “alright, this is the year I’ll upgrade”. Every year, a better card comes with “revolutionary” changes, blah blah blah. This year I said, “ok, 970 it is!” – but they’re expensive and for what? WoW? But I didn’t fall into my own trap this time. I used logic and value-mindedness to make points for getting something.

Black Friday rolled on up and I ended up swinging the other way. After being with Nvidia since about 2005, I ended up finding a(n?) R9 390 for $269 incl. a $20 rebate that I hope I’ll get. As I said, I really had to talk myself into it but here are the good points. The R9 390 is definitely faster and better than the 970. They run at the same price. The 390 approaches, if not beating on several fronts, the 980. Considering the 970 is beaten in performance and sits at the same price, it was a no brainer. My only fear at this point is driver issues, but I’m hearing all over the place now that Crimson is actually doing a great job. Will see how it goes when my card gets here.

Seeing as how I’ve had my 560 forever, well, since 2011 anyway, I’m hoping this card lasts me at the minimum 4-5 years as well.

To sum it up, the point is that you probably shouldn’t wait. Patience is a virtue but with tech, you really can psyche yourself into waiting for years if you’re too careful. Find a deal, jump on it and be happy.

Perhaps if you know you’ll be upgrading your system within the year 2016, then it’s good to wait. But if you recently upgraded and have no plans to within the next 2-3 years, just dooo eeett.

Tos Kerman

the R9 390 doesn’t even approach the GTX 980.
It’s also SLIGHTLY worse than the GTX 970.
where do you get your info? I’m an amd fanboy but you don’t see me spreading blatant misinformation

Neoprimal

You may want to do some research. That’s what I did to come to this conclusion, including checking various reviews and benchmarks. I used tomshardware, anandtech, overclock.net, reddit for user experiences and various other sites where it was widely determined that for the price the 390 is a better bet and that the 390 is a better performer in general than the 970, especially at higher resolutions. The 390 doesn’t beat the 980, obviously. I said that it approaches and beats it “on several fronts”.

Either way, I have had the opportunity to test both cards on my system since I wrote the post and I ended up keeping the 390 because it performs much better at 4k than the 970. The 970 is marginally faster at lower resolutions than the 390 in the games I’ve tested it with but since I have no intention of switching out my 4k monitor, I’m fine as is. The only issue I had was WoW crashing with early crimson drivers and that was fixed 2 months ago.

I am not trying to spread misinformation, I did my research and this is what I came up with. I am not a fan of either team and have 0 reason to lie or spread misinformation.

Pratik Lohot

even i had hd 6970, few months ago i bought r9 290x vapor x for 232 pounds on amazon uk pretty good deal and nice upgrade, also luckily at the right time, you should also move onto atleast r9 380/380X, not need to hold onto that relic inside your computer until its death.

kevin bennett

No they aren’t, they also released a beta of Crimson today that supports all the cards that were put into legacy status today. While you won’t get all of the new features (because the legacy cards are VLIW and just don’t have the ability to run some of it) you will get the new UI and as many features as your card will support.

I installed it on my E350 netbook running Win 7 X64 and it works great, seems to have increased my hardware acceleration nicely.

HarryHirn

AMD is really testing the loyalty of their customers.

I welcome changes if everything would work fine, but this is really making me sad now.

Since Windows 10 release AMD was not able to provide a driver than allows me to run more than two monitors simultaneously, which i know my graphicscard is able to because it worked on Windows 7 for months.

So instead of fixing major issues they come up with a new driver/settings software that does not solve old problems but instead create new ones.

With Crimson they removed the Desktop Management settings that allows the user to add or remove displays or TVs. So now i am not even able to try to enable my third monitor and get an error message saying it is impossible. I am no longer able to change something on my current setup…

Nice work AMD.

NOT!

Daniel Anderson

Running 2 monitors just fine on my HD 5850 since ~2011. Also you should look into Additional Settings as CCC isn’t completely eradicated.

Yeah, two monitors are running here too, but i have connected four.
On the Catalyst at least i had the option to switch around, but now i am not even possible to manage my pesktop and active monitors.
On Windows 7 all worked perfectly…

Daniel Anderson

Go into Radeon Software > Display and click on “Additional Settings” in the upper right hand. Let me know if that helps you with finding some “legacy” settings.

HarryHirn

yeah, that would be the right place for that options, but they removed it. in desktop management it only says colors, and the important tab is missing…

Trunks0

Try this Harry,

– Remove the drivers
– Unplug one monitor from the GFX card.

– Re-install the drivers
– Reconnect the 2nd monitor
– Check and see if the options have returned.

If that works, report the bug to AMD.

Joel Hruska

If you are having a problem, please post here specifically with which monitors, video card(s), and how you have each connected to your PC. I will endeavor to help you find a solution.

HarryHirn

Dont get me wrong, but i dont think you can help me here…
Worked on that for hours and even in the AMD forum without solution

3 monitors at a time is possible, not all four, i know that.
But 3 at a time definetly worked already in Windows 7.

Ext3h

These 4 monitors are not connected at the same time, are they? No more than 3 different monitors may be attached at the same time (all true DP type monitors count as one), or even auto detection will fail.

Also make sure to connect the TV always last, because I think there is also a bug related to multi monitor setups when one device has audio capabilities.

Also, in the new settings panel, make sure to activate “GPU scaling” and set the scaling mode to “keep aspect ratio”. I don’t know why, but that setting seems to be required when operating more than 2 monitors with different native resolutions.

Joel Hruska

So if I understand correctly:

Your two Samsung displays are attached to the native DVI outputs on the GPU.

Your BenQ G420 is attached to to the DisplayPort connector via DP to DVI adapter.

HarryHirn

Yes thats right. Plus the TV connected to the HDMI.
All on the same card at the same time.

I am 100% sure it is a driver problem because it worked for several years on my old card 7850 and also on the R270X until upgrade to Windows 10.

For sure not all 4 “monitors” at the same time because a R270X cant generate more than 3 clock signals, which is why you need an eyefinity 6 card for more than 3 simultaneously working displays. but i always could use 3x TFT or 2x TFT + 1 TV at the same time, no matter what arrangement.

With the new Crimson i am not provided any option to activate a display that is not active. In fact the display manager is missing.

Joel Hruska

Have you tried the “Eyefinity” tab? That’s where AMD moved the multi-monitor configuration and support, I think. Some of the old Display Manager functions are also still in the Catalyst back-end (you can see them in the screenshot I posted in this story, but here’s the link for simplicity).

Can you confirm the maximum number of monitors you’ve successfully configured? I’m assuming the two DVI monitors.

Stephen Gillespie

Had the same problem, here’s what I did:
1) Went into Control Panel
2) Went into Devices and Printers.
Note: It may take a bit for everything to load in this.
3) Right clicked the inactive monitor

4) Selected “Display Settings” in the menu that popped up
5) Clicked the inactive monitor and set Multiple Displays to what I wanted it to be.

Has been a long time since I’ve had to mess with this in Windows, but glad that at least THAT works, even if this isn’t in Crimson. Hope they fix that issue soon.

Bri

R9 290 here and it has run dual monitors since day pre-win10 launch. My bigger issue is icon movement, which it does anytime the screen shuts off. It’s so bad that I’m planning on moving to a single ultra wide screen monitor.

HarryHirn

thats horrible!
seems like there are a lot of different problems around.
a new one for every user ;)

btw dual monitor is no problem. triple monitor setup doesnt work :/

Ninja Squirrel

Finally AMD able to match Nvidia driver quality.

Will Ovtuth

Lmfao, is that a joke?!? Nvidias drivers have been nothing less than atrocious for the last 14 months. They have managed to break pretty much every feature they have and god forbid you put GFE on your rig. So at this point it doesn’t take much to make better. Although I can def give kudos to AMD for really stepping it up in the last year in the gpu side.

Joel Hruska

I’m still on Windows 7, but I’ve had no trouble whatsoever with any NV driver release.

Aces-In The-Palm

I went to windows 10, I found the drivers problematic, control panel in particular. I ended up having to manually remove all previous software suites and drivers then installing drivers while in safe mode to ensure I could get into the control panel to turn SLI on.

Ekard

My Desktop is Win 7 still, no issues. My Laptop is Win 10, no issues however I did do a clean install of Windows 10 when I got the laptop. Both PCs have GFE and have not given me an issue. Of course both systems are single card systems driving 1 display.

Faibless

i got bluescreen for over a year because of their shitty Geforce ”Experience”. Either the driver would crash or it was the shadowplay stuff running in background that would. I think it was only solved last week as I didn’t change anything and the problem is gone now. Used to crash 1-2 per day on GXT 670. First and last Nvidia card. That’s what happens when you try to buy a new GPU at the highest point of the Bitcoin minin craze :|

Justin Kashtock

Wanna swap? I have a perfectly functioning XFX 6970 and I still have the box for it. I prefer NVIDIA, but my cousin gave me a decent deal on his 6970 a while back and it was def better than the GTX-460SE I was running at the time.

Ninja Squirrel

Neither Nvidia nor AMD releases 100% perfect drivers. According to my experience, Nvidia drivers are great, but I don’t mean that I have no issues, but they are much better than AMD drivers. Nvidia’s very first Win 10 driver is not good, but I have zero issue with the latest 359.00 WHQL.

353.06 WHQL Driver improved the performance of Kepler based cards by 2-5 FPS, if not it didn’t improve any performance. But Nvidia didn’t cripple the performance of Kepler based cards. Also Nvidia still supports their 5 years old GTX 480 trough WHQL drivers and at the mean time AMD completely ditched the HD 6xxx, 7xxx users.

Joel Hruska

So let’s look at this. Keep in mind that the entire Radeon Crimson driver *does* run on HD 5000 and 6000 cards today, right now. Future drivers won’t, but this one does.

The first HD 5000 cards launched on October 12, 2009. Those are six year-old cards. The HD 6970 is five years old. The rest of the HD 6000 series was still based on VLIW5 (some rebadges, some tweaks, but same underlying architecture).

In other words, the hardware in the HD 6000 and HD 5000 families is between 5-6 years old, even if the cards are younger.

Now I can’t honestly say which GPU from 2010 is better — a GT200-era card from NV or an HD 5000 card from AMD. But in both cases, you’re looking at old equipment. Windows 10 support isn’t going to go away, and modern titles will *continue* to run on these cards.

No, it’s not quite as nice as what Team Green is offering — but five years is pretty reasonable.

That depends how you look at it. In my experience the ‘majority’ of gamers wait tuntil the better cards are a lower price before they buy them, so they might buy them 2 years after the first card came out. Then they only get 3 years support. You should get x amount of years from the day of purchase not manufacture, otherwise they should be removed from commercial availability

A cheaper/crappier card was beating an older and clearly superior card.

jack324

So I installed crimson last night and so far I’m loving it, however I have noticed two issues one minor and one really glaring problem.

The minor issue is that videos playing in chrome seem to be showing some tearing and stuttering. This will no doubt be fixed in a future update.

The glaring issue is in the new control panel itself. I can’t find the option to adjust the display setting anywhere. No resolution or refresh rate options, even in the advanced settings. This is especially annoying in the context of custom resolutions, since windows won’t recognize the new resolution on its own.
Or at least it doesn’t in 7.

Realistically this just an annoyance for someone with a good understanding of windows and its settings, I can still adjust both resolution and refresh rate by going into window’s screen resolution control panel and clicking advanced settings, and from there I can force whatever resolution/refresh rate my monitor reports plus the custom resolutions. But this may be beyond alot of users abilities or knowledge.

Hopefully it’s just me and my particular computer, but if not, I hope they fix it soon.

Joel Hruska

Jack,

Let me see if I can dig up a solution for you on this. I’ve got to run out for a bit but I’ll see what I can do.

jack324

Anything you can dig up I would appreciate it.

Phartindust

Open Crimson, click Display tab, top right corner click additional settings, left hand side under My Digital Flat Panels, 4th item – Custom Resolutions, click agree, and there you are.

jack324

That’s not what I’m talking about. I can make custom resolutions, but I can’t find any option in Crimson to change the current resolution to anything at all, even non custom resolutions.

hvd hvd

my next xad is a amd cad.i have a fx 6350 win 10 dx12. and im going with a amd carrd nexr upgrade.win 10 amd=win.

Harrison Ford

Crimson feels like a major driver upgrade for my 2xHD7950, both in terms of performance in DX9 games, Crossfire and consistency, as well as the new UI and blazingly fast launch time of the Radeon Settings. Half a second, if that, on a mechanical HDD. AMD is listening to their customers.

most of the content within the settings app doesnt load at all so dont want to click anything as i dont know what im clicking on

Safat

I have 15.7.1 catalyst drivers installed and i want to upgrade it to the new crimson drivers. Do i need to uniinstall my current drivers before updating/installing or can i just update it normally with prev drivers intact?? Need some advice pls

Noah F

I have a Radeon r9 270x 2gb. What windows 10 driver will work for this? or is there one?

Bill

I don’t like it. Causing complications with other software. I want my catalyst back.

David Perry

6 Monitor setup here – 1 LG TV, 3 24″ LED LG monitors, 1 Acer 19″ LCD, 1 17″ LED – no stuttering with World of Warcraft before Crimson – now, it’s so bad I have to revert. Simple things like using the Salvage Yard and the bar going across for % done… stutters so bad. Maybe it’s because I also have a Radeon 6450 FLEX card installed (for the extra monitors). My Sapphire Radeon R9 280 4GB Nitro card plays wow OK now, but before it was GREAT! The 2 cards together may not like the new drivers. We’ll see…

Love the new look… but the stuttering comes and goes…

rangtsen bbhoy

can someone help me with the latest driver for r9 270x. since i installed it last night i cant able to launch or play any game its say DISPLAY DRIVER STOPPED RESPONDING AND HAS RECOVERD. I even tried to install the previous driver still the same result.

Noyjitat

I don’t like this new shiny ui because I can’t find all the settings that the original had. A bunch of settings appear to be automated or missing…

AuralVirus

it’s utter junk – removes flat panel scaling slider which completely flucks over anybody using a tv as a monitor. I have ZERO use for anything they’ve added yet MUCH use for whats been taken away.
if it ain’t broke….

surfshop

AMD’s Crimsom is rubbish, it skimps on all the features. You cant even set the fan to automatic unless you put it on overdrive. Bizarrely in my experience, the card will get super hot without detecting it… UNLESS ITS ON OVERDRIVE YOU CAN MANUALLY ADJUST IT. Im going over to Nvidia next time.

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